A QR code is a two-dimensional barcode developed by the Denso Wave company.

The current implementation handles three modes: numeric, alphanumeric and byte. Kanji is currently not supported. Please contact the maintainer if you need it.

  • Numeric: only digits from 0 to 9
  • Alphanumeric: all numeric characters, upper case LETTERS, and the characters " " (space), "$", "%", "*", "+", "-", ".", "/" and ":"
  • Byte: All characters from the Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1) character set.

Main functions

The main qr_code() function returns an object of the qr_code class. This is a logical matrix with specific methods for printing and plotting. The print version uses UTF-8 drawing symbols and the result depend on the font used. For a better quality QR code it best to use plot() or generate_svg().

library(qrcode)
code <- qr_code("QR CODE")
print(code)
##               
##  ▗▄▄▄  ▗▗▄▄▄  
##  ▐▗▄▐ ▐▟▐▗▄▐  
##  ▐▐█▐▐▞▐▐▐█▐  
##  ▐▄▄▟▗▚▚▐▄▄▟  
##  ▗▖ ▄▖ ▖ ▗▖   
##  ▝▄▜▄▌▘▜▚▛▚█  
##  ▐▜█▚▀▐██▙▙▞  
##  ▗▄▄▄▐▄▞▖▗▟▄  
##  ▐▗▄▐▝▖▖▞▗▟▘  
##  ▐▐█▐ ▞█▛▄▐▄  
##  ▐▄▄▟▐▘▜▀▐▜▝  
##               
##               
## 
## use plot() for a better quality image
plot(code)

A QR code displaying the value 'QR CODE'

generate_svg(code, filename = "man/figures/qr.svg")
A QR code displaying the value ‘QR CODE’

Installation

The qrcode package is available from CRAN, R universe and GitHub.

# install from CRAN
install.packages("qrcode")
# install from R universe
install.packages("qrcode", repos = "https://thierryo.r-universe.dev")
# install from GitHub use the remotes package
remotes::install_github("ThierryO/qrcode")

Legacy code

The legacy function qrcode_gen() had several known bugs. Because of these bugs, we re-implemented the code from scratch in version 0.1.4. We created new functions. The old functions are defunct since version 0.2.0. We removed them in version 0.2.2.